Red Thunder

“PIN numbers,” she said.

“Dumb.”

“ ‘Ferrari-stud’ is his online handle, too. He uses that when he goes to an escort service website and has one of the girls drop by here when he’s working late. I have quite a file on him. I read all his mail. I know all his secrets, and believe me, some of them could get him ten to twenty in Raiford.”

She called up an internal database and easily changed the color of her borrowed Ferrari from “red” to “black.” She did something involving dealer plates and registrations that I didn’t really understand. Then she went to the DMV.

“Every car dealer in America has some kind of fiddle going with somebody at the DMV, if they can afford it,” she said. “The guy I’m leaving an e-mail with makes good money on the side by doing little chores for us, when the need arises.”

A patrol car was passing along the street out there. His turn indicator was on, and he was about to enter the lot. I tapped Kelly on the shoulder and pointed.

She stood and waved. The officer riding shotgun spotted her and waved, said something to his partner, and they sped off.

“Safer up here,” she pointed out. “The cops are used to me working late.”

When she shut the computer down we went to her office, where a printer was chattering. She pulled the paper out. It was a dealer’s window sticker listing equipment and options and price. She pointed to where it now listed the color as black. She said it was listed that way in all the documentation at the dealership, and in the morning it would be listed that way at the DMV, too.

“They’d have to go all the way back to Italy to hear any different,” she said. “We don’t have any red Ferraris in inventory. They’ll have to look elsewhere.”

[186] “The one problem I see with that,” I pointed out, “the car actually is still red.”

“Not for long.”

Out back, a guy was sitting in the car scraping the old dealer sticker off the window with a razor blade. Another, younger man was standing by the car. The older guy smiled at Kelly.

“Midnight black, right?” he asked.

“As soon as possible.” She held up two key rings.

“Let my boy drive the Hummer. This is my son, Josh.” Kelly tossed him the Hummer keys. “What color you want it?”

“Whatever’s most ordinary.”

“That would be Desert Storm beige. Most of the right-wing militia generals in Florida drive around in Desert Storm camouflage Hummers.”

They drove off, and Kelly told me that by this time tomorrow Travis’s flamboyant red-and-black super-jeep would look like a Gulf War veteran.

“Sounds expensive,” I said.

“Bob owes us some favors. He almost got himself in trouble a few years back, some pesky business about changing engine block numbers and paint on some cars whose ownership was… not quite crystal clear, let’s say.”

“Stolen.”

“We car dealers don’t like that term much. Misplaced.” She gri

I didn’t have a problem with that.

THAT MORNING I caught up on some chores, got a few minutes’ sleep in the afternoon, and then spent the evening and night in Kelly’s little apartment on the beach south of town. We swam, lay on the beach and talked until it was dark, bought a pizza and took it to her place.

Kelly talked a lot about making a final break with her father but she hadn’t done it yet. The fact was, she still kept a lot of her stuff in the huge, gated, fake-Greek pile of stone where her father lived with his [187] second wife. She spent some nights there, some with her mother in Ormond Beach, some with me, and some at her own place. She didn’t really live anywhere, in the way that most of us do.

The fact is, she didn’t make enough money to afford the payments on her Porsche if she’d had to buy it herself.

She had money. I didn’t know how much, but I figured it was substantial. It was in a trust her father had set up so she couldn’t use any of it until she was twenty-five. Until then, she had to get by on the wages her father paid her-which even she and I, who loathed him, had to admit were fair for the work she did. He knew her value, and intended to keep her under his thumb as long as he could.

“I could quit and find another job pretty easy,” she said. “I would probably take a small cut in pay, but it might be worth it not to have to deal with him every day. But I’d be just as bored as I am now. What I know is the car business. And I hate the car business. But what I do like is business, and I think I’d be good at it.”

So she vacillated, and we talked. She never laughed at my plans to find a career in space, and she helped me with my studies. And we never talked about getting married.

THE NEXT DAY Travis and Jubal picked us up, very early, in a five-year-old Ford van with enough seats for the six of us. Before getting in Kelly looked it over quickly and asked Travis what he’d paid for it. When he told her she winced.

“You should have talked to me, Trav,” she said.

“Just get in, Ms. Strickland Mercedes, okay?”

We picked up Dak and Alicia and hit the road, destination unknown. Boxes of Krispy Kremes and cups of strong coffee were passed around.

We took the A1A exit and crossed Merritt Island and entered the Ke

We got there in time to witness something I’d never seen before: the raising of the world’s largest garage doors to reveal the retired Shuttle [188] Atlantis and the old Saturn 5, newly restored after many years of sitting in the Florida sunshine and rain, now standing proudly and awesomely erect in one of the bays of the old Vehicle Assembly Building. All done to music, of course… Also Sprach Zarathustra, which was probably always going to be the anthem of space exploration, thanks to Stanley Kubrick.

“I want y’all to just look at that Saturn 5 for a moment, kiddies,” Travis said. “I want you to look at it, and I want you to consider the concept of hubris.”

“And dat be… what?” Jubal asked.

“That’s what the ancient Greeks said when somebody was getting too big for his britches… or whatever Greeks wore under their togas. Excessive pride. Arrogance. I want you to look at that rocket and ask yourself… ‘Are we biting off more than we can chew?’ The builders of that thing are gods, in my book. And the Greeks warned mortals not to try to act like gods.”

“It’s not the same, Travis,” I protested.

“No. We’ve got a few advantages over the guys who built and launched these things. Chiefly, unlimited fuel. Ninety-nine percent of that rocket was fuel, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are very tricky to handle, very dangerous in themselves, even if you don’t burn them in those huge engines. We don’t have to worry about that.

“But we have to worry about just about everything else. Do you know how many million parts were in that thing, fully loaded, on its way to the moon?”

“No, how many?” Alicia asked.

“Well… I don’t know, but it’s a bunch. Somebody here can tell us. My point, though, is one faulty transistor could bring this behemoth down in flames. One screwup in space, and we’d be dead. Can we build that well?”

“Sure,” Dak said, but it was impossible to stand in the shadow of that thing and say “sure” with any confidence. So I backed him up, and so did Alicia and Kelly. That left Jubal, and we all turned to him, the only guy whose vote really counted.

[189] “I t’ink we can, ma fren’s. But I promise you dis. De firs’ minute I t’ink we cain’t do it, I tell you right off.”

It didn’t bring a smile to Travis’s face, but eventually he nodded his head.

“Let’s go see the museum,” he said.